Is it better to have a Disable/Enable Instancing Feature ?

[A2Zen]

I have try the new instancing beta test for kepler and found that it run slower than the 2.58e ...

Sometime you need only a peak performance and another time you need a better memory management...

If you can choose to enable or disable the Instancing function it would be great !!!

cheers

[matej]

Yes, I agree. If it would be possible to implement, then I would like to see the ability to disable instancing support. Cause in reality for scenes that don't need instancing or scenes that could need it, but they still fit in your memory, you would prefer to have render speed instead.

[Refracty]

But there is no need to do it manually.
If there is instancing then it is slower, if not then it is faster.
Lets keep it simple.

[roeland]

Instancing is partially disabled for scenes where only a simple mesh node is rendered. This is the reason for the speed difference between rendering with the entire scene as a single mesh and rendering with even one object as a separate instance. Unfortunately it is not possible to completely eliminate all the overhead of the instancing support on the fly.

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Roeland

[ROUBAL]

Hi, I am making an intensive use of instances in my current project, and I have tested various instancing methods. I have also encountered a weird bug giving a square ghost object with instances, but maybe it is due to Blender as I started this project a long time ago with 2.49b, and sometime strange things occurs when switching to 2.63a.

I have made twice the same scene. On the first, the building is instanced 4 times but its own structure is not instanced.

The second one use Instances as much as possible, and each part repeated in the model is instanced : windows and their frames, chimneys, columns, lanterns, balusters on balconies.

Both scenes have around 400000 instances of large grass patches, and the vehicles are instanced twice each in the two scenes. The difference between the two is only due to the buildings instances.

The second node setup fills the surface of four large screen ( a zoom feature would be welcome in the graph editor) and has required half a day with tens of exports of obj and scatter files and the scene is 4x slower to render. The gain with high use of instances is around 130 MB in term of Memory usage.

I will try an other method, with the buildings cut in vertical slices, because creating instances for each kind of window leads to a huge amount of identical materials to setup (glass for example).

Moderate use of instances : 4.88 Ms/sec - 1625MB used.
High use of instances (optimized for memory) : 0.96 Ms/sec - 1495.9MB used.

I have done no test without instances, because the scene would not fit in memory.